social essay
Damond
4Socialstructure.pptxStructure and culture
Roadmap:
The concept of social structure and its many manifestations
Status groups and roles
Social hierarchies and life chances
Social institutions and socialization
Culture and its social structure
Structure of culture: values, norms, material goods
Socialization process and agents
Differential socialization
Cross-cultural analysis: ethnocentrism, cultural relativism, cultural appropriation and cultural imperialism
Structure: status, roles, hierarchies
Social structures organize who we are and what we do
They are the boundaries within which we become who we are and live our lives
Come with both rules but also resources
Status groups are core element of social structure:
Gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity, class (to begin)
These are the categories/labels by which we understand each other and ourselves
They are all modern inventions – have NOT “always existed” (nonsense!!)
Statuses come with roles
Gender roles for example
Because we occupy multiple statuses we play multiple roles
Can sometimes experience role conflict
We are assigned roles but we also perform them
Achieved status: we work to claim the status
Educational attainment, sometimes class (later in life)
Ascribed status: how others perceives you
Race, often times gender and sexuality
Statuses also place us in social hierarchies
Status can be a resource or a barrier – depends on the placement within the hierarchy
Examples: for white people their racial status is a resource that protects them from over-policing and incarceration
Status hierarchies and life chances
Social hierarchies are about groups, not individuals
Individuals do have agency – agency is the ability to make choices and act within the social structures of our society
But even the process of becoming an individual is a social process: other human beings create you, care for you, teach you everything to get going in life – language, ideas, skills
Family is an important social institution, an element of structure, but it too is shaped by multiple group hierarchies
Sociologists think about social groups relationally – how they exist in relation to other groups
White people in relation to Latino people (race)
Queer people in relation to straight people (sexuality)
The rich in relation to the poor (social class)
Our life chances are powerfully shaped by our placement in these hierarchies
Life chances: what is likely to happen or be possible in our lives based on our combination of social statuses
Education does not remove sexism penalty
Education does not remove racism penalty
Institutions as social structure
Education is an important social institution in all of our lives
Social institutions are patterned relationships and rules that organize an area of our lives
Family, workplaces, education, government, media – all examples
Institutions are sites through which we learn our place in the broader society
Institutions socialize us into roles and into inequalities
Family disadvantages women (disproportionate amount of time and labor doing care work that is not recognized as work)
Workplaces that advantage men (no paid family leave, glass escalator to leadership positions)
Criminal justice system that disadvantage Black and Latino people (disproportionate incarceration rates)
Education advantages upper income students (school funding, hidden curriculum)
Your group memberships influences your relationship to all of these social institutions
Put another way: there is no social institution in American life that is not stratified by class, race and gender
We are not all in this together – dramatically different life chances
Group membership influences our socialization process: how we learn culture – which ideas, values, roles become important to us
Socialization: from society to self
The socialization process, how we learn culture(s), begins in the family and extends across the life course
Culture refers to how human groups construct meaning and activity – it is symbolic and material
It is our toolkit for living – how we make sense of ourselves and how we spend our time on planet earth
We learn and participate in many cultures across the course our our lives
Agents of socialization: social institutions in which we learn a variety of values, beliefs, roles, & norms (i.e. a variety of cultures)
Family (ex: class, race and gender roles)
Peer groups
Education
Religion
Workplace
Voting and civic life
Media: all of the above
Brogurt
Culture has a social structure
Culture is our toolkit for everyday life: the ideas and practices through which we learn to make sense of who we are in the world and in ourselves
Comprised of 3 elements:
Values and beliefs
Norms (govern all social encounters) and practices
Material goods (environments & technologies)
Each of these elements reinforce each other
Norms express and protect our values/ beliefs
The material goods we create also express & protect these values & beliefs
Changes to one influences changes to the others
Example 1: How the internet changed U.S. culture, economy and society
Example 2: Think about culture of education and what its values are, how those are expressed and protected by norms and practices, and material goods and technologies
In the US, we usually ”consume” culture (meaning we have to buy things to do things)
Conspicuous consumption: showing our status through our purchases
Does this Range Rover show who I “am” ? Or does it show where I stand in social hierarchies?
We analyze culture industries – those segments of economy that produce cultural items for consumption
Socialization in an unequal society: differential socialization
We are not all socialized into the same values and norms
This is called differential socialization
Think of gender socialization
Distinctly different values and norms are taught to boys and girls
“Gender roles” are a set of values and norms we are taught to believe in and perform differentially
Same is true for race, class, age,… Some examples:
Different class cultures
Middle class parents teach self-direction and curiosity, while working class parents teach conformity and obeying authority
Why is this the case?
Relationship to economy and skills needed for likely jobs
Race and ethnicity:
White parents often teach kids their future is up to them, i.e. no social forces shape your life
Racial and ethnic minorities often teach kids that social forces (like racism) will impact their lives, so also teach a skill set around negotiating this reality
Idea of double-consciousness from Du Bois: an “in-group” sense of self that is authentic, and an “out-group” awareness of how one is perceived by dominant group
Example: “the talk” Black parents have with kids about how to behave around police
Making sense of cultural difference
Culture works without our noticing it – like a language
When we notice cultural differences, or conflicts, we can respond in one of two ways:
Ethnocentrically or with recognizing cultural difference
Ethnocentrism is judging another culture by the norms and values of your own culture
This is common response but logically incoherent
Ex: heteronormative views of homosexual or queer relationships
“Who is the ‘man’ in this relationship?”
Cultural relativism instead tries to understand a culture on its own terms
Cannot understand meaning of practices without context
The Quinceañera – broader cultural meaning
Cultural imperialism involves members of more powerful groups deeming the culture of subordinate groups “inferior”
Only groups (usually nation-states or dominant groups) can enact cultural imperialism because it is about controlling institutions (such as laws, schools, etc)
Ex: implementing “English only” laws for schools or city signage
Cultural appropriation: when dominant culture takes the cultural practice of an oppressed group and transforms it for different race/class of people to “safely” consume it
The question of who profits and who is criminalized is important consideration
